Growing Consensus That Iraq Is Hopeless

by Jim Lobe

After weeks of hurricanes and controversies over
swift boats in Vietnam and Texas and Alabama National Guard records, Iraq is
beginning to creep back onto the front pages, and the news is uniformly bad.

Consider some of the headlines in major newspapers that appeared on their front
pages on Wednesday alone:

Against these stories  putting aside the other headlines detailing deadly
suicide and other attacks that have killed scores of Iraqis in the past week
 Bush's insistence in a campaign address to a convention of the National Guard
Tuesday that "our strategy is succeeding" appears awfully hollow,
a point made repeatedly not only by Democratic, but by some Republican lawmakers
at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday.

"It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing," noted Nebraska Republican
Sen. Chuck Hagel, who has long been skeptical of administration claims that
the Iraq occupation was going well. "It is now in the zone of dangerous."

Indeed, it is now very difficult to find any analysts outside of the administration
or the Bush campaign who share the official optimism.

Consider the case of Michael O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings
Institution and former National Security Council aide who has been among
the most confident of independent analysts of the basic soundness of Washington's
strategy in Iraq.

"In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall
effort in Iraq is succeeding," he testified to a Congressional panel just
10 months ago. "By the standards of counterinsurgency warfare, most factors,
though admittedly not all, appear to be working to our advantage."

This week, however, O'Hanlon, who has developed a detailed index periodically
published in the New York Times that measures U.S. progress in postwar
Iraq, was singing an entirely different song at a forum sponsored by Brookings
and the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS).

"We're in much worse shape than I thought we'd ever be," he said.
"I don't know how you get it back," he conceded, adding that his last
remaining hope was that somehow the U.S. could train enough indigenous Iraqi
security forces within two to three years to keep the country "cohesive"
and permit an eventual U.S. withdrawal. "A Lebanonization of Iraq"
was also quite possible, he said.

His conclusion was echoed by his CSIS co-panelists, Frederick Barton and Bathsheba
Crocker, who direct their own index that relies heavily on interviews with Iraqis
themselves in measuring progress in reconstruction .

According to the five general criteria used by them, movement over the past
13 months has for the most part been "backward," particularly with
respect to security which they now consider to be squarely in the "danger"
zone.

"Security and economic problems continue to overshadow and undermine efforts
across the board," including health care, education and governance, according
to a report their project released last week. Among other things, it noted that
despite a massive school-building and rehabilitation program, children are increasingly
dropping out to help their families survive an economy where almost half the
working population remains unemployed.

The growing media chorus of despair actually began just one week ago, a few
days after the brilliantly staged Republican convention in New York City had
ended, when the U.S. military death toll in Iraq since last year's invasion
topped the 1,000 mark, and the New York Times published a front-page
article entitled "U.S. Conceding Rebels Control Regions of Iraq."

Since then, a number of articles have featured the increasing violence of the
insurgency, which is now mounting an average of more than 80 attacks on U.S.
targets  four times the number of one year ago and 25 percent higher than
last spring, when the U.S. faced serious uprisings in both the Sunni Triangle
and in the south.

Washington officials had predicted that attacks would increase sharply just
before the transfer of sovereignty from the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) to the interim government headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi
in late June and would tail off.

But, as noted by a front-page article in the Washington Post late last
week, more U.S. troops were killed in July and August than during the initial
invasion in March and April 2003. Injuries suffered by U.S. troops in August
alone were twice what they were during the invasion.

The escalation in violence over the summer is now being attributed by administration
officials to the insurgents' efforts to derail the elections, currently scheduled
for January.

The increased violence  particularly in Baghdad and the so-called "Sunni
Triangle" where Fallujah, Ramadi, Baquba and Samarra, among other towns,
are controlled by insurgents  has created a serious dilemma for administration
strategists who, on the one hand, reject the notion that there are "no-go"
areas for U.S. troops, and, on the other, want to keep U.S. casualties down
and off the front pages and U.S. television sets, particularly before the November
elections here.

As a result, they appear to have settled on a strategy  bombing suspected
insurgent hideouts from the air  that further alienates the civilian population.

"I don't believe that you can flatten cities and expect to win popular
support," noted CSIS' Barton.

"This is the classic contradiction of counterinsurgency," Steven
Metz, a strategy specialist at the U.S. Army War College, told the Inquirer.
"In the long term, winning the people matters more. But it may be that
in the short term, you have to forgo that in order to crush the insurgents.
Right now, we are trying to decide whether we have reached that point. In Vietnam,
we waited too long."

Meanwhile, both independent and U.S. military analysts believe that the insurgency,
which the administration still insists is made up only of Ba'athist "dead-enders,"
foreign "jihadis," and criminals, has grown from an estimated 5,000
people one year ago to at least 20,000 and possibly significantly more.

Jim
Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's
correspondent in the Washington, D.C., bureau. He has followed the
ups and downs of neo-conservatives since well before their rise in
the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

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